Desert Island future plans

Right now, I have the following games on my Desert Island CD:

• The excellent C-evo
• David Teach's Gin Rummy
• A tiny version of Zillions of Games
• Cultivation
• Andy Noble's take on Tetris and a 1980s video game called "Manic Miner"

Of these six games, I am going to delete two for the next Desert Island release: Cultivation and Manic Miner.

Cultivation doesn't have compelling graphics, IMO, and its gameplay is a bit far-fetched for my tastes.

Manic Miner's problem is that it's a faithful copy of the original 1983 game, and like the original game, it's, as TVTropes calls it, "Nintendo Hard". After struggling for an hour, I was able to get past the first screen, and even on to the third screen, but there's no way to save the game so I have to go back to the first screen every time I start the game up.

There is supposedly a cheat code for it (802926) which lets one jump past levels, but it doesn't work. So, out it goes. Andy's take on Tetris is nice (and my fiancée likes it), but I'm ditching his take on Manic Miner (which, yes, is faithful to the 1983 game, but we've moved beyond that).

There's a couple of other takes on Manic Miner for the PC out there but I don't like either of them either -- one of them has the audacity to ask for a shareware registration fee for the game. As a programmer who despises freetards myself, I agree people should get compensated for their work, but when original Manic miner creator Matthew Smith flat out says "if they are making money then I want my share", I don't feel it's ethical to make a shareware Manic Miner without giving Matt his cut.

So, deleting all this leaves me about 850k to play with. 150k or so of that will be some C-evo stuff (my HOWTO, a couple of small programs to mod C-evo's gameplay, a diagram of the tech tree, and slightly modified Mongol nation graphics); that leaves me with about 700k. Some of that will become wedding photos once I marry my fiancée January sometime; but I need to find one or two more really tiny games with compelling gameplay that doesn't quickly get stale.

Some ideas:

• An emulator and some old video games. My biggest issue here is finding games the creators don't mind having available on the Internet
• Win Frotz (under 200k) and a few text adventure games. The issue here is that these kinds of games have no replay value.

Does anyone else know of any good tiny video games for Windows? Replay value is important.

New Deadwood snapshot

Sometimes, I can't resolve host names at work. I'm trying to figure out why this is so; that in mind I've added the ability to log all DNS queries sent to Deadwood and replies sent from Deadwood when verbose_level is 100 or more.

I also fixed a bug where certain logging functions added a newline regardless of one's verbose_level setting.

New MaraDNS snapshot

Since there has been some confusion about how to have star records in MaraDNS, I have made the following changes to MaraDNS today:

• The * character is no longer permitted in zone names. Stars belong in zone files, not zone names.
• I have added a FAQ entry briefly explaining how MaraDNS star records work

Hopefully, these changes will stop users from incorrectly configuring star records.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/1.3/snap/200912/

New Deadwood snapshot

In today's Deadwood snapshot, I have updated the Windows reference documentation to have all post-2.3 Deadwood parameters documented.

I have also updated the documentation available on Deadwood's web page.

http://maradns.org/deadwood/

MaraDNS wish list status

Here is the status of various wish list items people have requested that MaraDNS have over the years:

• IPv6 (DONE, except for Deadwood's recursion)
• Multiple views -- DNS answers vary depending on the IP sending the request (won't do)
• SQL support (won't do)
• Include other files in mararc (done in Deadwood, won't do in MaraDNS)
• DNSSEC (won't do)
• Ability to dynamically load zone files (won't do)
• DNS curve (won't do)
• BIND zone file support (mostly done; will finish up)

Note that won't do means I won't implement the feature in question without being paid.

I've been making some stuff for C-evo

I've been spending my geek time these last two weeks or so making some stuff for C-evo. Namely:

• I have taken a tech chart someone else made and compressed it to be only a little over 100k in size
• I have written some programs that slightly modify the gameplay: The final year, the technology advancement rate, the city growth rate, and the map sizes can now be adjusted.
• I have written an over-6000-word HOWTO that describes C-Evo's basics; it is geared for someone who has never play a Civilization game before

The files I have made can be looked at here:

http://samiam.org/cevo/

Desert Island update

Earlier this month, I updated my Desert Island disk and changed a few files. Notably:

• Instead of Doom, we now have six tiny video games: C-evo, David Teach’s Ginny Rummy, a tiny under 400k version of Zillions of Games (only Chess and a couple of variants, no music, no sounds), Cultivation, and two of Andy Noble’s games (Tetris, Manic Miner)
• I have added a lot of pictures, most notably a nice desktop background picture I took nearly two decades ago and more family pictures
• I’ve added the text of a 1979 computer article talking about computers in the home
• Various other minor updates, most notably progress on making sure we correctly use “LORD” or “The LORD” in the Old Testament of my modified World English Bible
• I no longer have a guide for reading playing cards; this is something I no longer do
• MSYS update to 1.0.11; 7zip updated to 4.65
• Spanish accents for a US keyboard added